Duato, Skeels and Eyal at the Bayerisches Staatsballett

National Theatre, Munich
May 4, 2024

The Bayerisches Staatsballett’s triple bill Duato/Skeels/Eyal is a wonderful example of how a performance can get under your skin and affect you in unexpected ways. The three pieces are about the death of woman, the extinction of a whole society and a world in which people seem closed in on themselves. Nevertheless, I left the theatre feeling elated and energised. Why? It was partly because the dancers were excellent in all three ballets, but it also had something to do with the sequence they were presented in, which created a crescendo from one death, to many, to then return to the living.

Nacho Duato created White Darkness in 2001. His inspiration was the tragic death of one of his sisters due to an overdose of drugs. Jaffar Chalabi’s set is a closed space, where from time to time, white sand, perhaps suggestive of a powdery drug, falls from the sky and lands in a circle on the ground.

A man, Osiel Gouneo, strong and dominating, and a woman, Laurretta Summerscales, young and innocent, meet in duets revolving around the heaps of the sand. Physically, she slowly deteriorates, at times collapsing in his arms. It is not until they pass the sand, her hand to his, to hers, to his, that you realize he is her dealer. After this, he leaves, and she slowly drops to the ground under a shower of yet more white sand.

In between their duets, four couples dance, perhaps members of the drug scene, perhaps her visions, when she is high. Karl Jenkins score creates an emotional background underscoring her highs and lows.

Andrew Skeels’ Chasm, created for the Bayerisches Staatsballett in April, takes us to a dystopian world in a dark cave. According to the programme, it is a science fiction narrative 50,000 years into the future. A group of people have been forced to live underground due to climate change, but things have now reached a point where they have to get out in order to survive.

The soundtrack by Antoine Seychal is filmic and co-creates the narrative. At first, we hear the dripping of water, then an ominous thunder. Later when the group of twenty dancers reach different areas of the cave, we hear hammering work-like sounds or celestial music creating hope, before the final catastrophe.

The cave’s inhabitants have mutated into creatures with six ribs and a spine protruding from their genderless bodies, made vividly visible by Marija Djordjevic’s costumes. They interact like one organism. At one point they crouch in a circle on the floor like beetles under a stone before you lift it, the light making them scatter. One lifts their torso, looking around as if to keep watch. Other times they perform hammering-like movement or throw their arms as if energy leaves via their fingers, crashing through the wall to the next chamber. Each area they reach is defined by light. Sometimes it is dark, sometimes darker. Sometimes it is lofty, sometimes the ceiling hangs so low, they can only just stand.

Eventually, a crack in the wall opens high above and light shines into the cave. They walk towards it bundling all their energy. Their sheer force makes it open unto the ground. But when they reach the light, they drop dead. The curtain closes with the last dancer before the opening to the world. You hope this creature will survive, but simultaneously ask, what will be outside the cave.

The combination of Skeels’ turning and writhing movements, often in back-bends as if this position were as normal as any other, at times performed with extreme energy and speed, and Seychal’s soundscape, makes Chasm one of the most exciting contemporary pieces I have seen in a long time.

The fourteen dancers in Sharon Eyal’s Autodance seem to be enclosed in their own worlds. Created in 2018, it begins with a man, Severin Brunhuber, striding around the stage with expansive arm movements, turning his head from side to side. A woman, Elvina Ibraminova, enters and performs filigree footwork around him. He ignores her except for a brief moment, when they dance in unison.

Slowly another twelve dancers join them in their exaggerated stride on half-toe with swinging arms. At times, one leaves the line, to perform a few steps on their own, but then returns. When Eline Larrory breaks out and performs a solo in slow motion, her body undulate in waves from feet to head as if boneless before she also gets back to the group, whose walking continues to the beats of Ori Lichtik’s soundscape.

You wonder if they are in trance, if they are in a club raving uniformly to the same beats, or if they are performing a secret ritual. At the end they just disappear into a misty fog. I shook my head thinking, did I really see this or was it just an illusion.

Read about the making of Chasm in Jeannette Andersen’s conversation with choreographer Andrew Skeels.